[0:00] And I've said before that the story of Jonah is not primarily a children's story about a guy who learns a great lesson about following and obeying God, a hero who learns to obey God. That's not what Jonah is about at all. Jonah is about, it's a rich and a textured story about a God whose compassion is far beyond our expectations. How do we deal with a God who is more compassionate than we think He should be? Well, we're going to look at the end of Jonah. I'm going to read all of chapter 4, even though I know we looked at the first part of it last week. So you can follow along from Jonah 4. This is after Nineveh has repented. That's where we pick up. But it, meaning the repentance of Nineveh, displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, O Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? Jonah went out of the city and he sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade till he would see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah so that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.
[1:45] So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do very well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle?
[2:46] Friends, this is God's word, humorous as it is. It is God's word, and he gives it to you because he loves you and he wants you to know him. So Jonah preached God's judgment on Nineveh and they repented.
[3:02] You would think he would be happy, but he was not happy. He was angry. Last week, we looked at Jonah's anger and how that had led him to accuse God. But chapter four is really a conversation. It's a conversation between Jonah and God. In fact, there are three questions that God asked Jonah. God loves to ask questions. You see God asking questions all throughout the Bible. We talked about a couple of them last week, but there are three questions in chapter four that kind of frame what's happening.
[3:32] And I think we'll look at each one in turn. But if you'll listen to these questions, if you'll let them become questions not just for Jonah, but searching questions for you, what you'll see, I think, is you'll see the invitation that God is giving Jonah and the invitation that God is giving you to be a part of the story of God's compassion in this world. That's what I think you'll see. So the first question we touched on last week, verse four, do you do well to be angry?
[4:10] See, verse five says that Jonah left the city and he went out to the east and he sat down and he waited. We don't know how long he was there. We don't know if he had been in the city and preaching for a couple of weeks. We don't know if he'd been there just a couple of hours. We don't really have a sense of the timeline. But what we do know is Jonah wanted to see what was going to happen. Jonah wanted to leave the city to go and to set himself up outside of it. He hoped that God's message of relenting judgment was just a delay of judgment because Jonah was hoping that Nineveh was going to get what was coming to him. Jonah hated Nineveh despite everything that had gone on in the story. He's been in the belly of a fish. He's been given the word of God for these people. They have repented. And despite all of this, Jonah still hated Nineveh. And so he's sitting out on some sort of rock outcropping where he is literally looking down on in judgment on the people that he hated. This reminds me of the story in
[5:18] Genesis 19 where God was about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. But before he did that, he brought Abraham out into the desert and up to a hill where he overlooked the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
[5:32] But unlike Jonah, Abraham interceded with God for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Do you remember this? Abraham says, you know, Lord, why would you destroy this? I know that they're wicked, but what if there are 50? What if there are 50 faithful people there? Will you destroy it then? And God says, no, for 50 people. And Abraham says, well, what about for 30 people? And then he says, well, what about for 20 people? And God says, no, for 20 people I won't destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. But there aren't 20 people there. And he eventually does destroy the city. The point, though, was that Abraham was interceding on behalf of the people. Jonah, by comparison, is sitting waiting for the judgment. He can't wait for the fire of God to fall down on the people of Nineveh.
[6:23] See, the purpose of God's question, why are you angry? Do you do well to be angry? The purpose of his question is to reveal Jonah's anger and his lack of compassion. Jonah didn't care about Nineveh.
[6:38] He thought that he himself was capable of judging who should receive God's judgment on their sin and who should receive his mercy. See, God's critique of Jonah is not just that Jonah is petty and vindictive and he's racist. That's not the primary critique, although that is true. His primary critique is that Jonah has elevated himself to the place of God. Jonah has confused that fundamental distinction, right? The creator and the creature. I love that Robert Taylor, every time he prays, prays about God as the creator because we need to be reminded that there is a distinction between us and God.
[7:25] You don't get to decide who God hates. And let me just be clear, God doesn't hate all the people that you hate. You know, I said it last week that if you think that God hates all the people you hate, you've created a God in your own image. See, Jonah had elevated himself. Jonah had become an enemy of God's ways and his heart for compassion. And it begs this question, right? If Jonah has really known God, Jonah was a prophet of God. If he has known God, why didn't Jonah look for God's mercy and God's compassion and God's grace? There was something faulty about Jonah's imagination. Jonah couldn't imagine or grasp that God could have compassion on Israel's enemies. Jonah just couldn't see it.
[8:22] He couldn't see mercy. All that Jonah could see was justice. See, in Jonah's imagination, here's what Jonah's imagination looked like. He just had this paradigm where everybody, it was only good guys and bad guys.
[8:39] It was only friends or it was enemies. It was people who are with us, they get mercy. If they're against us, they get judgment. He had a stunted imagination. After my sophomore year in college, I got recruited to come work at a camp down on Lookout Mountain. I was living in Dallas, had lived in Dallas all my life, was in college in Dallas, and got recruited to work at a camp down on Lookout, down near Mentone, called Alpine Camp for Boys. And I remember vividly driving into the camp the first day. I had never heard of Chattanooga. Really, I don't think I'd ever heard of Chattanooga as a city. I'd certainly never heard of Lookout Mountain, but I drove in that day and there were all these guys, these other counselors from these kind of SEC schools. And there were all these guys, they were all like tossing frisbees. None of my friends tossed frisbees. They were all wearing like Birkenstocks. My friends did not wear sandals. They all had that like kind of swoopy 90s Southern, you know. If you were in college around then or had children in college, you remember that kind of swoopy white dude frat guy hair. And
[9:50] I was like, whoa, this is so different. And that night, the camp director, his name was Dick O'Farrell, and he was just a wonderful, gentle man. He gathered all 70 of these counselors together, and we had a meeting. And he went around with no notes. He went around the room. He'd never laid eyes on some of these young men before. He'd met them and other people had interviewed them, or he had met them once like me. And he went around the room and he introduced each young man.
[10:21] And he told where they were from. He told something about their family, where they were at school. There was a dignity to it. And I began to learn over those summers of being at camp. I, you know, I got to, I started worshiping at Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church of all places. I met these families that were stable and healthy, secure. They were people who were faithful. I started to meet these young college guys who were, the only way I can describe all these guys that I met were that they were wild and adventurous. But they were utterly earnest about their faith.
[10:57] There wasn't a rebelliousness to them. I was invited to see the world from a different perspective than I had seen it before. That I began to see, and what started that first day was that what was told to me was that God is at work in a different way than you might have imagined. God is at work through these mundane things like, you know, like cabin time, like family style meals, like hard work, like not a lot of sleep. Things like the dignity of just knowing the name of a college student and treating them as important. The things like regular church, things like overnight hikes and ADHD 10-year-olds who were not easy. And even things like simple Bible studies that I began to see that God was at work in a different way than I had imagined. And I began to change as I saw God working in a different way.
[12:00] That is what God was trying to do for Jonah. He's trying to get Jonah. Jonah is set up outside and God is trying to get his attention to say, Jonah, I am working in the world in a way that you do not recognize. You've got to expand your imagination that God's compassion was far beyond what Jonah thought. God's compassion extended to people that Jonah thought it should not extend to.
[12:31] You know, and it does beg the question, how far do you see the compassion of God extending? How do you look at your neighbors and friends? Do you classify them as enemies that must be conquered?
[12:48] Political enemies? Religious enemies? Are they problems that just need to be solved? Are they threats that need to be neutralized? Even do you come and see your neighbors and friends as sinners who need to be saved? Is the first thing that you see of them rejection by God? Or do you see that these are people who have been made in God's image, who have infinite dignity and worth, and that maybe the compassion of God would extend to them? How do you see them? That's the question that God was asking. Are there people that you judge are not worthy of God's compassion? That's the first thing he was wrestling with Job about. Second question that we get to is in verse 9. We read it, do you do well to be angry? Same question, about the plant? So despite Jonah's bad attitude, he's sitting out on this rock outcropping. He's, you know, extremely arrogant. Still, God appointed this plant to grow up quickly. Scholars think this was probably something called a castor plant.
[14:02] It was, we're not sure, it was clearly something that was a gift from God, right? Look at verse 6. Why did God give this? Verse 6, to save him from his discomfort. Now, Jonah had already built a little structure. It was called a booth. If you remember the Feast of Sukkoth was in the fall. Jews celebrate.
[14:21] This is the Feast of Booths. It was to commemorate the wandering of Israel in the desert. They would build these booths and live in them for a week. In fact, when I was working with college students in Austin, the Jewish Student Society would do this in the front yards of student housing, which was really interesting. And they're just simple structures. So you wonder, well, why does he need additional shade? We're not sure, but he did. I don't know if it was where the sun was or how he had built it or what, but God provided something that Jonah needed in that moment despite Jonah's irritating arrogance. But in fact, he says, look at verse, what is this? Is verse 7 maybe?
[15:07] Oh, the end of verse 6. So Jonah was exceedingly glad of the plant. There's kind of a, it doesn't come through in our English very well, but in the Hebrew, it's like this excessive gladness that Jonah has. It's almost like there's a little kind of self-pity. It's almost like Jonah is communicating or what it's inserting in of Jonah's attitude is. A little bit of self-pity, like, well, finally, God finally gave me something good. I finally have this plant and I have a little bit of shade. Everything's been so bad up to now.
[15:45] But it's funny that the relief was short-lived. It feels as though like Jonah is a little bit on a yo-yo, right? God gives him this plant, but then the next morning, God appoints a worm that goes in and eats the roots of the plant and so it withers. And so then it gets hot and God sends this east wind, this wind that would have been something that gusts. Have you ever been, have you ever heard of the Santa Ana winds in California?
[16:10] These are the winds that blow in off the coast and they, they just feel like it's breezy, but it feels like it's an oven blowing wind on you. It just feels gross. It starts wildfires. It's a dangerous kind of wind.
[16:26] Why was God doing this? Well, God was giving Jonah an object lesson about the way life really works. One of the books that I've read about Jonah is from Eugene Peterson, and here's how he describes the story of Jonah. Living life under the unpredictable plant. Living life under the unpredictable plant.
[16:48] There is a metaphor in this that all of us have to wrestle with, and that's very simply this, that sometimes the unpredictability of life is overwhelming, right? I mean, we've all had these experiences. You know, you get a, you get a cancer diagnosis and it turns your future plans upside down.
[17:08] Your, your children make some decision that sets them on a path and a trajectory in life that would not have been what you choose for them. Or maybe you have an accident or car trouble or unexpected costs. Or maybe you have a family member that needs your help and it's really inconvenient. Or someone sins against you and betrays you. Or someone fires you from your work. You have all of these things that you weren't expecting, and yet you're asked to live faithfully to God in the midst of it.
[17:35] You see what God is doing here. He's saying, Jonah, you don't see my compassion. Now I'm going to put you in this place of unpredictability. This place that, that feels like you can't get a handle on things because I want you to be looking towards me. I want you to see that you don't have the answers you need. I want you to come to me. It uses the word appointed. God appointed the plant. He appointed the worm. He appointed the wind. It's a life that God is directing. God is putting Jonah through, through all of this as a living parable. See, you would think that this would help Jonah. Hey Jonah, you're not seeing this right. Now I'm going to get you off kilter so that hopefully I can communicate something true to you. And you're, you would think that the arc of the story is, and Jonah learned his lesson. But that's not what the story says. Look at verse 8. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die.
[18:52] It is better for me to die than to live. I mean, talk about a temper tantrum. You know, he, his self-deception is so deep that he senses that he deserves something from God that he doesn't deserve. Isn't that, that sense of kind of consumeristic mentality, I deserve to have these things. Isn't that something that's so deep in us? I mean, we actually do this. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about this because we could talk for a while. But we as churches, we're doing this to you. And you're doing this to us as church leaders. We walk around as Americans demanding convenience, high quality programs, things that meet our sense of, of desire. We're dominated by what is pleasing and comfortable and convenient. We have a consumeristic mentality. Boy, the things that we get all twisted up about at church, you know, this isn't all that pretty of a room.
[20:05] Those plants, they're all fake. I don't know if you knew that. You know, we have lots of typos in what we're doing. Things don't work right. And you know what?
[20:18] Those are the kinds of things that we, in our consumeristic mindset, think that we deserve something better that is convenient and comfortable and pleasing. And it is papering over and covering over this deep dysfunction at the root of who we are. We begin to think, like Jonah, that God, we deserve God to give us the things that are comfortable and convenient and pleasing.
[20:46] And so when God brings us hard things in life, it's like, wait, what? I don't deserve this. God, you should have given me something better.
[21:01] We should, we could talk all day about this, but I think there is a call for us as the church in America right now for us to turn from being consumers to being simply receivers of God, receivers of whatever God gives. Okay, I can't get stuck on that. Verse 11, the third question that God gives. Should I not pity Nineveh? Finally, God gets Jonah to the point. Jonah has, Jonah doesn't, Jonah is arrogant. He's also self-pitying. He's got this kind of consumeristic mindset.
[21:41] He's demanding from God. And then you get to this final thing. Verses 10 and 11, it repeats the word pity twice. Did you notice that? Jonah, you pity this plant, even though it's an insignificant thing.
[21:56] Shouldn't I pity Nineveh? Now that word pity is translated in other parts of the Bible as compassion. It's the word we get, compassion. And what it's saying here, what it's communicating here is that it means to be grieved over something, to have your heart broken over something. What God was saying is that Jonah has had his heart broken over the plant. This plant, it grew up. It was awesome.
[22:24] Life was working really well, and now I am brokenhearted over the fact that it is gone. And God's question to him is, wait, should you really care about the plant? Shouldn't you care about the people? Why do you care about the plant and disregard the people? You see, when God looked at Nineveh, what did he see? He saw the greatness of the city. We've talked about that before. He saw the 120,000 people who lived there. He saw even their animals. Isn't that funny? 120,000 people and a lot of cattle. I'm not sure exactly what that's referring to, but that's a lot of cattle, I would think, that God notices. But he also saw their spiritual condition. You see how he described them. They are people who don't know their right hand from their left. They are people who are confused spiritually.
[23:21] They are foolish. They are lost in their blindness and their ignorance. And yet, even in their blindness and their ignorance, I am going to have compassion on them. There is no hint in God's response.
[23:39] In his question to Jonah, you don't get any hint of this kind of like, well, you know what? It serves them right. Or they're about to get what they deserve. There's no hint of that kind of vindictiveness.
[23:53] Chuck DeGroat is a therapist and he's an author. And he tells this story about when he was a young therapist. And he had a marriage that he was helping counsel this couple. And the man, man, he was a bully. He bullied his wife. He even bullied DeGroat in the sessions. Every sort of technique that DeGroat would throw out to him, he would kind of throw it back in his face. He was a bully. And DeGroat despised him. He was angry at him. He wanted to just throw in the towel of dealing with this particular couple. And he sat down, as therapists often do, and he was telling some other therapists about this particular case and getting their advice. And one of his friends said this, you know, he has a story too. Maybe he was bullied. Maybe he was abused. And in that moment, DeGroat was able to not make an excuse for the man's behavior. It was still wrong behavior. But it opened up an entire world for him of ways to approach the man. It instantly humanized him. The difference between Jonah and God's view of Nineveh was that Jonah only saw enemies. God saw people, real people.
[25:12] People who, yes, were evil and wicked and rebellious, but people nevertheless. Their being people was more important to God than them being enemies. You see, God is able to hold together the justice and the mercy that Jonah can't. For Jonah, it's either you are friend or enemy. And for Jonah, it's you, if you are a friend, you get mercy. If you are an enemy, you get judgment. And that's the only way that it is. But God holds justice and mercy together. God says that he will by no means clear the guilty, but that he is fundamentally going to deal with compassion. In fact, of course, it would be unloving and unjust if God did not deal with justice and with unrighteousness. God will enact justice, but he will never act without compassion.
[26:07] How in the world can God hold justice and mercy together without separating them? How can he do that? He does it in Jesus. Jesus is the greater Jonah, as we're told. He's the greater Abraham. You see, not only was Jesus completely obedient to all of God's commands, but in that climactic moment at the cross, do you remember what happened to Jesus? He was taken outside of the city. He was put on a hill where a cross was there. You know, he follows in the footsteps of Jonah. He follows in the footsteps of Abraham. But unlike Abraham, instead of just interceding on behalf of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus took their punishment. Unlike Jonah, who wanted the condemnation to come down upon them, Jesus himself called condemnation down upon himself for the benefit of wicked humanity. We could even say it this way, that Jesus let God's judgment fall upon him. We could say it, I like it better this way. God's compassion on the evil and wicked people of Nineveh was made possible because Jesus, the Son of God, stood in their place.
[27:31] Jesus took the punishment for Nineveh's violence and cruelty and rebellion against God. Jesus sacrificed himself so that even God's enemies, Nineveh, could be reconciled to God. God did not withhold compassion from Nineveh because it was evil. God himself bore the cost of Nineveh's wickedness.
[28:00] Jesus at the cost of his own Son. You see, that's the compassion that Jonah simply could not see. And that's the compassion that we don't see. We don't actually see that God might redeem even his most bitter enemies, even the most bitterly wicked and evil and violent people in this world. He might actually do the work of redeeming. And part of the reason we know that is true is because Jesus has said that he would die for all of his people, even the people in Nineveh.
[28:39] The story of Jonah ends with a cliffhanger. It ends with a question.
[28:50] Well, it ends with cattle. But other than that, it ends with a question. This is one of just a couple of books in the Bible that end this way. It ends with kind of this ambiguity. You know, is Jonah going to repent? Is he going to come to his senses? I don't know.
[29:11] But the ending invites a sense of self-reflection, doesn't it? Each of us has to wrestle with the compassion of God like Jonah did. You know, even though Jesus is the greater Jonah, in one sense, you are Jonah and I'm Jonah. We live in a world where we're constantly overlooking and given the opportunity to look down in judgment upon the wicked people of this world.
[29:45] In fact, as our culture changes, there is an exceedingly big temptation to look upon those who would be seeming enemies of God and look on them with judgment to talk about who are our friends and who are our enemies in culture. Who are the people we work with? Who are the people we are against?
[30:04] Who are our allies and who are our threats? God doesn't see the world that way. That's not how God views this world. His fundamental way of looking at the world is that He reigns over all things. There are no threats to Him. There are no threats to God's kingdom reign.
[30:28] And He has the ability to bring any person into reconciled relationship with Him through His own compassion. And if God has brought His compassion to you, that means He can bring it to anyone.
[30:47] The question remains, do you and I have the compassion of God for this world?
[30:59] That doesn't mean that we don't call a spade a spade. It doesn't mean that we don't see right and wrong or we pretend as though it's not true. But it does mean, do we see the people of this world the way that God sees them? That's the fundamental question of the book of Jonah is, can you view the world with the compassion that God does? Why don't we let that question sit out there as we come to the Lord's table? Because at the Lord's table, what we see is God's compassion coming to each of us.
[31:34] The only way that we will see through the lens of God's compassion is if we understand the compassion of God that has been given to us in Jesus. And so I would invite you as I pray and as we come to the table to fix your eyes upon Jesus, the one who has enacted God's compassion for us. Let me pray. Lord, we so want to minimize Jonah. We want to see it as a kid's story, simplistic. We want to see it as a story that is just about, how do we obey God? But Lord, it's so much more than that. It's a story about your unlimited compassion. I am in awe that you have not rejected Jonah, despite his foolishness, despite his hypocrisy. Jonah is included in the story of your compassion. And what that means is that I can be included in it too. Despite my judgmental heart, despite my minimizing of your grace, despite my thinking, I'm worthy of your compassion, even though those other people aren't,
[32:55] I can still be included in this grand story of the compassion of God in this world. One day, Lord, we know that before you, every knee in heaven and on earth will bow and every tongue will confess Jesus as Lord. And we will see with clear eyes how the compassion of God has been given to humanity.
[33:16] It's hard for us to see now. We pray that you might give us eyes of faith to see it, that you would give us hearts that would trust it. And that even now that you would work through these simple, this simple meal, these elements, this bread and this juice, these common things, would you seal this truth to our hearts by faith? Lord, we ask you to do that for the glory of Jesus and in his name.